Repository FAQs

About the Ulster Institutional Repository (UIR)

An Institutional Repository is a showcase for an institution's research output which
is open to the public but may be restricted to authorised users.
It is a collection of digital archives established by an institution to manage,
preserve and disseminate the intellectual output produced by authors of the institution.
The repository items are

digital or digitised

tagged with metadata to describe the subject, ownership, copyright, and structure

The Ulster Institutional Repository is an open access online database,
showcasing research that is carried out by researchers at the Ulster University.
Material held in the UIR is available for free via the Internet, to be read, downloaded
and copied for non-commercial private study or research purposes.
Depositing material in the UIR is not intended to be an alternative to standard publication.
It is a complementary approach designed to showcase Ulster's research output, and to
provide a searchable, multi-disciplinary, managed resource.

Researchers are encouraged to self-archive their work by depositing it in the
repository once it has been published/produced in the traditional way.

Open Access

Open Access means allowing your scholarly publications to be freely accessed by anyone in the
world, usually by placing work in an online repository so that anyone can view it over the
internet.
In so doing, you maximise the impact of your work as the potential readership of Open
Access material is far greater than that for publications where the full-text is restricted
to subscribers only.

Many research funders now insist that the written-up results of their research are placed in
Open Access repositories.
The Juliet database provides a
summary of the policies adopted by the major UK research funders as part of their grant
awards procedures.

Most publishers will accept the deposit in Open Access repositories of papers published in their
journals, subject to certain conditions.
The RoMEO database provides a summary
of the policies adopted by the major publishers.

HEFCE's open access policy states that Journal Articles and Conference Contributions must be available in an open access form to be eligible for submission to the next REF: '....to be eligible for submission to REF2020, authors' final peer-reviewed manuscripts must have been deposited in an institutional or subject repository on acceptance for publication. Deposited material should be discoverable, and free to read and download, for anyone with an internet connection'. The policy can be accessed here.

Outputs must be deposited in an institutional or subject repository within three months of being accepted for publication. Outputs must be deposited as the final, accepted, peer-reviewed text (as a minimum).

You should check the SHERPA/REF tool (https://ref.sherpa.ac.uk/) which will let you know if your journal/publisher complies with the REF OA policy and whether there are any embargoes on your accepted manuscript.

The output must meet the access requirements as soon as possible and no later than one month after the end of the embargo period. The embargo period typically begins at the point of first publication (including online publication).

However, where there is an embargo period imposed by the publisher this must be respected and the deposit must be 'closed' which means only the metadata is available and access to the full text is restricted until the embargo expires.

The OA policy for REF allows for this and closed deposits or outputs which are still under embargo will be admissible to REF (provided that the date of their first publication is within the REF publication period). The guidance re. embargo periods states that embargo periods should not exceed the following maxima:
• 12 months for REF Main Panel A and REF Main Panel B
• 24 months for REF Main Panel C and REF Main Panel D.

The output must meet the access requirements as soon as possible and no later than one month after the end of the embargo period. The embargo period typically begins at the point of first publication (including online publication).

In addition, you will also find some useful FAQs available on the HEFCE REF site.

Benefits of the UIR

Allowing your scholarly materials to be stored and distributed via the UIR allows you to maximise
the dissemination and impact of your research and adds greatly to the distribution
provided by traditional journals or personal websites.
In addition:

the UIR provides a robust system for the long-term storage and retrieval of your research output and will continue to maintain your output should you move institution

the use of persistent URLs within the UIR makes referencing the online version of your paper easier and more robust

the UIR is an effective mechanism for archiving and publishing multimedia formats that are not suitable for traditional publication methods

research has shown that papers which are freely accessible are cited more readily (see next heading for links)

the UIR provides a showcase for an author's, school's or institution's output and raises the individual researcher's and the University's profile

Depositing Items

Any academic research output which has been published or produced by a member of staff or PhD student
of Ulster University and which has copyright clearance may be included in the repository.
Examples are:

book chapters, conference papers, posters, patents, cds and any other digital object

papers published in peer-reviewed journals

papers published in edited journals, conference proceedings or edited working papers series

Deposits will be accepted in any electronic format.
To facilitate Ulster's commitment to open access and long-term preservation, wherever
possible material which is deposited in a proprietary format (e.g., Microsoft Word) will
be converted to a format for which readers are freely available, such as Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF).

The metadata attached to each UIR item is similar to the information in a library's catalogue
record for a book (eg: title of an item, author, subjects, etc).
Metadata is descriptive information about an item that allows it to be more easily
found by search engines and metadata harvesters.

Copyright

This depends on the copyright agreement you signed when you published your paper and on the publisher's
policy with regards to authors posting copies of papers in institutional repositories.

Due to progress by the Open Access movement, a significant number of publishers now allow authors to
post a copy of their article in an institutional repository.
However, there are publishers that do not allow authors to post a copy of their article on an
institutional web site at all and therefore to do so would be to breach your copyright agreement.
See the Copyright section for further information.

If you do not have a copy of the copyright agreement or if the agreement does not address the question of
self-archiving, you may find it helpful to check the
SHERPA/RoMEO database.
RoMEO lists copyright and self-archiving policies for a number of publishers although it should be noted
that it is not 100% comprehensive in its coverage of journal publishers.
It should also be noted that the situation regarding publisher policies can change.

If the publisher is not listed on the RoMEO database you may be able to find details of the copyright
agreement you signed on the publisher's web site (often within the section on guidelines or instructions
for authors and contributors).

If you do have a copy of the copyright agreement and it appears to forbid deposit in a repository, you
should bear in mind that the publisher's policy may have changed since the agreement was drawn up and that
the change may be retrospective.

It should be noted that, even when copyright is not retained by the author, most publishers allow their
authors to self-archive.
See the Copyright section for further information.